This invention relates generally to the field of attribution of mobile application installations on a mobile device, and in particular to attribution by a network access application running on the mobile device that analyzes the device's network traffic to detect impressions.
Mobile devices such as mobile phones and tablets have many mobile applications installed on them. Many mobile applications are free to download or charge a minimal fee for downloading the application. Mobile applications often make money by advertising within their application, which advertising is often encouraging a user to install additional mobile applications on the device. The applications that provide the advertising may be referred to as publisher applications, as they publish ads to the user. A publisher application may be paid for serving ads in a variety of ways. For example, some publisher applications are paid for an impression, which occurs when the publisher application displays a particular content item (e.g., an advertisement) within the mobile application. In other examples, the publisher application is paid when a user takes an action following the impression, such as a click on the third party application advertisement, an installation of another mobile application, or any other observable other user event.
It is often desirable to measure the effectiveness of a marketing campaign on a mobile application. For marketing campaigns where the goal is for the user to install an application on the mobile device, measuring the effectiveness of a campaign may involve detecting that a mobile application was installed following an impression of a particular advertisement. The installation is a conversion event, which is attributed to the impression according to an attribution model.
Detecting the impression and conversion and applying the attribution model is typically accomplished by the publisher application and/or the ad server. However, an entity that is not directly involved in the advertisement process or otherwise affiliated with it typically has no way of determining whether an installation of a mobile application occurred due to an impression, in part because the entity has no visibility into the impression and or conversions. This technical limitation prevents such third party entities from computing independent analytics about application installations on a mobile device.